Nahuel Gallotta
08/01/2021 20:19
Clarín.com
Police
Updated 08/01/2021 8:46 PM
On Friday, May 28, around 10:50 p.m., a neighbor of Don Torcuato, Tigre, was startled by the noises and called 911. He said that in the house next door a couple was arguing and that he had heard the noise of an ashtray broken.
Gianfranco Fleita Cardozo (25) left his girlfriend's house and went on foot to his, located a few blocks away.
His partner managed to call Gabriel, his brother-in-law.
"See
if you come to look for him with the car.
He's drunk,
" he asked.
She had thrown him out of her house herself, for being drunk.
It was almost 11pm and there was a nighttime restriction on walking.
Gabriel listened to him.
He found his brother in a corner.
But Franco, as his friends and family said, refused to get into his car.
He preferred to keep walking.
At the next corner, vehicles from the Tigre Operations Center (COT) and the Tigre Patrol Command would cross.
It was in Asunción and Entre Ríos.
Apparently, and according to what the witnesses would tell Gabriel, Franco was ordered to board the patrol car.
And he refused.
"There is a video where he is heard shouting not to hit him anymore, and he asks if they hit him for not having a chinstrap," says his brother this Sunday, at the Tigre station, on a new day to demand justice for his brother.
Franco, who had no criminal record, was beaten on the floor, and while he was handcuffed.
His girlfriend heard his screams and approached the place.
There she asked to stop beating, but they forced her to get on another patrol car.
One of his daughters also witnessed the beating.
"At one point, one of the policemen noticed that a neighbor was recording the beating and sent one of the patrol cars to run, so that they could not continue taking images," adds Gabriel.
Until then, three COT patrols had intervened (in which there were three Buenos Aires police officers and three municipal inspectors) and a mobile from the Tigre Patrol Command.
Gianfranco Cardozo (25) had an 8-year-old son and had been arrested when he was drunk.
"Fleita Cardozo and her partner were transferred to the Don Torcuato 3rd police station", recreates María del Carmen Verdú, from the Coordinator Against Police and Institutional Repression (Correpi), a lawyer for the victim's family.
"
The beating was such and so marked that the police from the police station refused to receive him
. They demanded that he be transferred to a hospital. And there a new COT mobile appears at the door of the police station," says Verdú.
From that patrol car, identified with the number 283, the municipal inspector Miguel Gustavo Cevasco (55) and the police officer Pamela Soledad Ruiz (33) got off.
Cevasco walked over to where Cardozo was.
He would have beaten him down, threw him to the ground and hit him again.
Franco died minutes later, on the way to a hospital.
"The next morning they called my mother and told her that my brother had died of cardiac arrest. I have no doubt that
they killed him for being black
. Here in Tigre the COT lives by stopping and hitting you for wearing a hat or being black", Gabriel warns.
"The prosecutor finds out about Cevasco's beatings from the police version. But there were two moments: the first, when Cardozo was beaten in the street, and the second, when they beat him at the police station. So far he is the only one of the 11 defendants who are in preventive detention ", clarifies Verdú.
The young man had argued with his girlfriend moments before the arrest and the fatal beating.
Prosecutor Virginia Toso classified the case as "
illegal harassment, severity and constraint,
" a crime that would imply a release from prison, the maximum of which is 5 years.
Franco's family asks for a cover change.
For them, it was an "
application of torture followed by death
."
"Gianfranco's
is the typical death of the tortured
. The death of fear and pain, of mechanisms that cause death. The crime of applying torment or torture is one of the most aberrant; it constitutes a crime against humanity; state crime, "says Verdú.
The cause
The other ten defendants were investigated for the same crime as Cevasco.
Verdú and Cardozo's family ask that they be summoned again, but to accuse them of torture followed by death, a crime that provides for a life sentence.
They are Joana López, Judith Arévalo, María Laura Lugo, Pedro Liporace, Ailén Oliveira and Jonatan Lencina, all officers of the Buenos Aires Police.
Meanwhile, Guillermo Otero, Daniel Vallejos and José Armoa are COT municipal inspectors.
Franco was 25 years old and the father of an 8-year-old boy. Until about a year ago, he worked in a company dedicated to the installation of windows in houses in Nordelta.
Due to the pandemic, she began to do bricklaying jobs and help her sister at the clothing stall at the La Salada fair.
In his spare time he built his own house, at the back of his family's.
He had been in a relationship for about a year.
EMJ
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